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Way to drink the cool-aid. Greece is in a full blown depression for going on 5 years now. And Greece wasn't exactly rolling in the dough before the crisis. 300,000 people have lost electricity because some genius tied property taxes to electrical service, get behind in property taxes and boom loose your electricity. The US has never been in as bad shape as Greece is currently, our "Great Depression" barely even scratches what's happening now in Greece. Veroufakis was correct in comparing Greece's current state to that of the Weimar Republic in the 1920's Germany, the situation which led to the rise of the Nazi's and remember the Nazi party, Golden Dawn, came in 3rd place in the last election.

Austerity is the single dumbest economic idea in the history of neo-classical economics. Of course people have bought into it because we have been preaching "balanced budgets=good governance" for the last 40 years and it is simply beyond retarded. No state in the history of mankind has ever regularly had balanced budgets, much less budget surpluses which is mandated by the Troika loan conditions (%4.5 surplus per year). %90 of the so-called bailout for Greece went straight to creditors in Germany and France, the Greeks saw nothing of it, meanwhile with %50 unemployment, cuts in social services, no universal healthcare etc. the Greeks have been royally fucked.

The best American comparison would be Detroit. One city manager signs a loan contract for the city, which included a really cool provision: If Detroits credit rating were to be downgraded the entire sum of interest on the $450 million dollar loan had to be paid immediately. Thus bankrupt Detroit. Contrary to popular opinion, most Detroiters who have worked hard all of their lives were not sipping champagne and eating caviar. The notion that the entire population of a city, or god forbid an entire country should be faced with spiking suicide rates (%50 rise in Greece since 2008) because some idiot gambled with Hedge Fund managers to drum up speculative money for things which were never democratically decided is simply insane. Or that they should be forced to privatize everything public and lose their pensions....man it is hard to imagine anything more unfair.

I lived in Germany for 15 years and they are so full of shit on this that they should be ashamed of themselves. %80 of germans bank with public banking institutions(sparkassen). Their private banking industry is tiny compared to most countries in the world and most germans have 0 credit/debt, ie. no loans, no credit cards etc. This is of course changing now as the EU forces Germany to privatize their financial sector, but Germany is only able to point it's finger at anyone else because they did not have a private financial system raping the population with cheap credit, like Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland etc. How in the flying F is the Greek state supposed to make good on all the shit debt, when prior to the crisis the average Greek had personal private debt equivalent to -%75 savings. Austerity means cutting jobs, cutting pay, cutting pensions, cutting services and this when everyone is already drowning in debt. Quit drinking the cool aid.

Lord Flipper (627481) writes "The California Public Utilities Commission decision on the Comcast/Time-Warner proposed merger has just been released. It's not an exciting read, BUT, the 25-bullet-point Appendix to the decision is a shocker. Example:

"19. Comcast shall for a period of five years following the effective date of the parent company merger neither oppose, directly or indirectly, nor fund opposition to, any municipal broadband development plan in California, nor any CASF or CTF application within its service territory that otherwise meets the requirements of CASF or CTF."

- Whoa! Trust me, Comcast was NOT expecting this at all. Here's one more, as an example:

"8. Comcast shall offer Time Warner’s Carrier Ethernet Last Mile Access product to interested CLECs throughout the combined service territories of the merging companies for a period of five years from the effective date of the parent company at the same prices, terms and conditions as offered by Time Warner prior to the merger."

What #8 means, was confusing to me, at first, as it appears they are saying Comcast has to let current TW customers continue to use, or take advantage of, something they already have. But that's not the case, at all. "CLECs" is CPUC shorthand for Competitive Local Exchange Carrier. And the ruling by the CPUC covers all customers, now, or in the future of the combined entity, here in California. What they're talking about here, simply, is opening up Last Mile Access.

Personally, I see this as a much larger "step, but step only, in the right direction, but the ruling today is definitely a total shocker. It could nix the merger, in California, only, or... it could light a fire under the asses of the FCC, or, the "codified" long-shot: it could bring real competition to Internet access, here in California, pronto.

The CPUC is basing their entire decision on Common Carrier law (Setion 706, as opposed to Title II), and, unlike the projected FCC decision (coming around the 26th of the month) the CPUC's decision has all kinds of "teeth" as opposed to the FCC's "Title II, with forbearance" approach. It could very interesting, very soon.

Wow Roma-mir what a stupid argument. Go ahead now and signup for the one way trip to mars. You obviously have no place in our society. Don't worry from our perspective, societies, we can accommodate your anti-social ilk. In fact we have made great strides in creating a society that even has space for anti-social assholes like yourself.
I am all into self-organization, people freely and autonomously working together to solve problems. But there is no relationship between autonomous self-organization and anything "private". To argue that individuals take care of all their needs privately, ie. With sole and exclusive claim, is borderline fascist.
Have a great day.

> the shutdown of Google News in Spain may be greater on smaller, less-well known news publishers than on name-brand news sites

Which seems to be the goal of most new legislation: protect the big established players, kill the small upcoming competition.

On what planet do you live? Obviously not the earth because Google is small relative to no other existing companies in the world.

To be honest we simply have not yet found the "right" answer to the problems posed the by the new internet technologies, whether that be in regards to news content, publishing, music or video distribution. The fact remains Google does not do news, they do not employee reporters, they do no investigative reporting, they do absolutely nothing that adds any value to the actual work done by newspapers, magazines, and reporters at large. All they really do is function as a parasite on the revenue streams of companies/public institutions that do actual reporting working. Now I will grant you that the current revenue model for the news/reporting industry is broken. Which is why America, but not just us, have hemorrhaged upwards of %60 of all reporter and editor jobs in the last 15 years. And I do agree that the hones is more on those agencies/companies to develop a better revenue model than it is on relative newcomers like Google. However what we collectively fail to grasp is that if we as a community fail to fund reporting and investigative journalism there simply will not be sufficient amounts being produced to offer us even a remote prayer of some kind of functioning democracy- without a vibrant free press there can under no circumstances be anything which calls itself such. We can argue whether that is already the case, however allowing the press to die, which has and is happening, is simply not an option.

I believe that we collectively need to come up with a system to compensate producers of content. There have been a variety of attempts in this direction carried out by many different societies around the world, we need to study what has been tried and develop best practices and then implement such. In the mean time mega-corporations like Google could and should carry some of this burden until we figure out how to implement such. There is great value in what Google does do. Facilitating access is valuable. But it is not as valuable as the production of that which people want access to, yet our so-called "free market" has rendered the value of production to being an afterthought and rewarded those who facilitate access to said produced material with nearly infinite capital supplies. Logically this problem is identical whether we are talking about Uber, Amazon, Spotify, or Google. And until we collectively come up with a fair response to this predicament we will continue to wipe out the very basis of value-add. One could argue that this is simply the self-annihilation of capitalism as an economic model, and one could argue that this is a positive development, yet what it actually means is the annihilation of the kinds of employment and labor upon which our class-based economies depend and the source of every valuable cultural achievement which we take any pride in.

I could not agree more. I cut my teeth on BASIC, later moving on to assembly, pascal eventually playing around with c++/java and my personal favorite vala. IF I had not had such a gentle hand holding experience like BASIC I never would have started programming. I know that there are lots of languages taught nowadays as beginners languages, but nothing compares to BASIC. Python absolutely sucks donkey balls for beginners-there is no reliable way for a newbie to cut and paste a small program -friggin stupid spacing bullshit. I eagerly awaited BYTE and RAINBOW magazine editions each month as a kid, each issue had small programs which introduced new ideas and techniques. Hell I wrote a WYSIWYG word processor in BASIC using hi-res (256x192!-) draw commands for each ASCII key, and was able to do text justification, scrolling, print, save and load functions for the CoCo, when I was 12(only having gotten my first computer for my birthday that year). I have a friend who has a brilliant 10 year old daughter who is bored out of her mind at school, due to a lack of challenge. I have been toying with the idea of trying to set her up with a raspberry PI, but there is nothing I have been able to find at all, despite quite intensive research, where she can use a book which contains descriptions of all the commands, syntax and coding examples. Javascript/python/ etc. are just way, way to difficult to use for absolute beginners. What potential pc's had for empowering the masses got lost along the way, for 99% of all computer users today have never even seen code, let alone are able to comprehend or write such.

Hate to break it to you bud, but the onous is on you to prove the opposite. The fact that you can't doesn't obviate your obligation to do so. See, when you argue against diversity, you are arguing for apartheid, whether you intend such or not-that's called recent history, and it's global in scale. Your ilk, the ones who believe in some kind of inherent value in apartheid, have been rather discredited by most of the last 75 years of history-around the world. You are the ones who have been trained to mouth words, you almost sound reasonable, if not for the context.

Are you done cryin your little eyes out privileged boy? Mighty fine racist sense there you got, but no it's not you-it's them "uppidy" N!5534's, how dare they forget their place, certainly not somewhere with such sweet gigs like Google.

Saying that you are against something because it violates principles of the free market is identical to the interview with the deathrow inmate who claimed Satan/God made me do it

Give me a fuckin break -name me one aspect, just one, when it comes to the automobile industry, which in anyway, ever, constituted a "free market"

You know if your opposition to something is based on Principles that have no basis in any reality that anyone can discern, then your opposition is actually based on something entirely unrelated. This is what kills me about some large number of Republicans and their intellectual avant-garde, the libertarians. There is nothing wrong with principled opposition. Sometimes it is absolutely invauable. But the so-called Principles of the "free market" and "free trade" are pure ideological bullshit. They always have been and always will be. Hell, none other than Karl Marx hosted a regular column in the New York Times back in the 1850's writing about the bullshit sold in the name of free markets/free trade. Now given that 8-9 generations of Americans have continuously bought hook line and seeker into this bullshit it is no surprise that the "conservatives" are most beholden to this bullshit. The intellectual dishonesty of %95 of elected politicans and %100 of current generations of Republicans makes me sick

Cry me a fucking river Fiat-Chrysler. Big bad government telling you what to do. I was not against the bailout of the car companies- the reason being with national unemployment at the time nominally over %10(and in reality closer to %20), the last thing we needed was to create another 1-2 million unemployed. But the auto bailout rewarded the exact same scum which had already bankrupted the auto industry, it also provided an oppurtunity to turn the screws on the beholden employees and utterly screw them even more. It was a rotten deal all around. The only thing more rotten than that was the status quo when all this went down. The big american auto companies had regressed every single year for a generation prior to this unfolding. Hell you couldn't buy an American car in the late 90's/early 2000's that could compete in terms of fuel efficiency with cars made by those same companies 20 years ealier. If those companies had kept advancing fuel economy starting back in the late 70's till today, none of their current models would even have a market. But no, they catered to the lowest common denominator=My Dick is bigger than yours. The original Robocop had it right-Detroit having been completely privatized by coporate takeover, the wealthy drove around in cars which carried the name SUX2000 which probably got the same mpg as the shit they produce today.

*But lest ye think I am a partisan Demcorats are the better Republicans (TM), at least when it comes to presidents. Republican presidents tend to be more restrained than their Democrat counterparts. Hell Clinton would have already have privatized social security if it wasn't for a certain blow job and cum-stained dress belonging to a young woman which ended up derailing his domestic agenda. Obama has done a a small number of trully good things and set a much better tone in our society than his predecessor, but on the issues which really count (injustices/day rating) he make Baby Bush look quite harmless. By my count there are less than 10 representatives/senators who don't buy into this bullshit and not one president during my lifetime. In 1992 I voted for Mikhail Gorbachov, fuck a bunch of NAFTA deja-vu TPP

Terrorism is a function of occupation. Every terrorist organization developed in the embryo of occupying forces: occupying forces being any forces not recognized at least by some large minority as being foreign=illegitimate.

Case 1: Al Quaeda. Born out of the ashes of the Afghanistani Muhajadeen, which was born out of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Case 2: IRA. Born out of the ashes of Brittish Occupation of Northern Island. Some %20-30 of local population historically having seeing Brittish as Foreign forces.

Case: ETA. Born out of Franco's fascist State, occupation of Basque country.

Ironically America has joined the ranks of terrorist organizations. America now claims the Earth as its jurisidiction and seeks to impose its will on all people everywhere. For some reason Americans see illegitimate people all over the world and are hunting them down. Apparently the world was occupied by foreign forces, who we deem illegitimate.

In America when someone purchase something at a cheaper price than those around them, they are at once smug in their self-certainty that they are smarter than those around them and held by those same others as being respectively smarter. The name of the game in America is simple-he who pays the most for a given item, or service is the sucker, the loser.

Personally I like how the Germans look at cheap. They have two words for "cheap", billig and guenstig. Now "guenstig" connotes something having a good value, the price may be relatively low, but when one purchases some good or service which is seen as "guenstig" they don't have the feeling of getting a "steal", but rather a good deal. Billig, on the other hand, is seen as morally cheap, seen in expressions like billige Nutte(cheap whore/prostitute). Walmart, as a business model, failed in Germany, primarily because it's products were seen as billig, and in a society where cheap products=billige Produkte=billige Arbeitskraft(workers), that is a no-no. Additionally "billige Produkte" are also seen as things which are quickly consumed and then thrown away(Wegwerfgesellschaft), whereas guenstig things are treated with value and taken care of.

In America, however, we score social status points by getting ahead of one another primarily by our collective sense of shamelessness, the gleeful abandon with which we enjoy expoliting one another, and this starts by going and shopping at Walmart, bragging to friends about how much you saved and never thinking about how your taxes are providing food stamps for the underpaid workers who work there. Any time you save a penny on productive work, the rest of society has to pick up the tab and pay the bill.

It really is that simple, you can rationalize it this way or that way but you're just rationalizing.

and there is no fee for processing SNAP transactions on EBT cards. (It is illegal to charge sales tax or card processing fees on SNAP transactions)

LOL

Don't believe the hype. It may very by state to state but here in Kentucky Chase collects fees on every EBT transaction, which is why no small businesses except EBT/Credit Cards for purchases under $5/$10.00 in downtown Louisville.

Everybody with an IQ above room temperature knows that homeopathy is complete and utter bullshit.

My My our SlashJocks are out in force tonight.

It is really sad to see how absolutely certain some people are about things, particularly among people who should have enough IQ to *grasp* the real limits of our knowledge.

There is a profound lack of knowledge concerning most of the food we consume. I am not talking here about dumb consumers. I am talking about the scientific community as a whole. Most of the chemicals used in food production have never been subject to any real testing. Of the handful that have been tested the scientific community is utterly ignorant how such tested chemicals work in the presence of other tested and/or untested chemicals. It's not as if there had been exahustive scientific research which cleared chemicals for use in food production. The vast majority of chemicals that used to be used in food production which are no longer used were excluded from usage by discoveries in unrelated scientific research that determined possible health issues with said chemicals, but again they were not found to be unsafe by careful research of these chemicals in food production, by scientists who study food production and human health in regards to food consumption. Simply put our scientists know slightly more than enough to be dangerous, but only slightly. You state something with absolute certainty about homeopathic products.

Yet there exists no scientific basis to draw such a conclusion

. The research simply hasn't been done. We do not now, nor have ever, nor will ever live in a world where scientists have performed exhaustive research into all of the chemicals used in production. When after the fact, after a product has been brought to markert and consumed by perhaps millions, we discover some health issues which we can directly correlate with the presence of a precise chemical in said products, we may take steps to ban or limit the usage of such chemicals. However the fact remains that the American public in general has been the testing grounds for industrialized food production for the better part of a century now. We are all guinea pigs in the great big experiment in modern food production. For all the knowledge that our Bio-sciences have produced in the last 50 years, we are still only beginning to scratch the suface of what is yet to be known. If you really want to be a stickler for *actual* scientific knowledge just go ahead and remove all the chemicals used in food production which have never had any *real* testing(as it pertains to the human body as used in food consumption), and then get back to me when the shelves are all empty.